Certifications, Centres, and Policies I'm rather
disappointed no-one commented on my idea of alternate centres for
advogato's trust-metric. I've a few more ideas, but not really
enough time to put them in a coherent form. Well, any comments
on what I wrote before are welcome.

librep
Working on John Harper's librep. Actually find I am using jade much
more often than I use emacs, because:

I like rep much more than elisp;

It has a much smaller footprint/faster startup time on my underpowered laptop

John Harper has shown a lot of good taste in the design of the system.

I'm surprised to be using it as much as I do:
I'd developed something of a dependency
on many advanced features of emacs, and I wouldn't have
expected to do without them
as well as I have. I still use emacs for auctex, though. At the moment I'm hacking hygienic
macros for librep,
but I'm finding it hard to make time for this.

zhaoway: Garbage collection *is* done at run-time. You may
be thinking of region inference, where the compiler tries to figure
out the mallocs and frees statically: this is an exciting
field of research, but it is a much less understood technology
than GC.

zhaoway asks: why do functional languages have garbage collection? One reason is that that it is awkward to stack allocate closures in a functional language, and becomes impossible if you want to do tail-call elimination. Also if one has an anonymous lambda
abstraction, how do you tell the memory manager you have
finished with it? It isn't absolutely impossible to have
functional languages without garbage collection, though,
and Richard Kelsey's Prescheme language (which lies at the heart of the scheme48 system) is such a dialect, though
arguably it isn't a full-blown functional language anymore (there are restrictions on the places one may create closures).

raph, Zaitcev: I pretty much agree with what raph
says, and I'm not a
pacifist (I supported America's campaign in Afghanistan, despite some
misgivings, see my diary from around then). I'm not even sure that I
would be opposed to an American campaign against Iraq, since I think
the potentially good consequences of removing Saddam Hussein from power
might potentially outweigh the badness of what I believe are the Bush
administration's reasons for wanting to remove him. Some
considerations:

I am strongly pro-Kurdish, a group that the USA
effectively betrayed after the Gulf war.
I think the probable reason why the elder Bush did not support the
insurrection
against Hussein then is because of
a crucial ally's, the Turkish government's, implacable opposition to
the idea of having a Kurdish nation on its southern border. Turkey's
reasons for this are unacceptable, as is its treatment of its
Kurdish minority, and the USA's behaviour was shameful.
I think the Bush administration should be willing to
openly criticise Turkey on this issue, even at the risk of losing
Turkey's support in a military campaign against Iraq, not least for the
reason that the northern Kurdish enclave would be an equally crucial ally
of the US.

North Korea is a bigger threat to the USA than Iraq. Iraq's threat
lies in the threat it poses to its neighbours, not in any direct
threat it poses to the USA or any of its NATO allies (whom the USA
must support in the event they are attacked). Even Hussein would not
be reckless enough to attack Turkey.

It is true that Hussein might launch an attack against Israel. I
do not know what the right strategy is for the USA to take, possibly
declaring a temporary (eg. 12-month) NATO-like mutual defence treaty.
I think a longer treaty would be unwise, given how reckless and
irresponsible Ariel Sharon's government is.

The need to collect more data on Hussein's weapons programme is an
ideal opportunity for the USA to let Iraq become less of an urgent
issue and tackle the really urgent issue of Noth Korea. It also
would allow the USA to criticise Turkey, and repair diplomatic
relations a little afterwards.

Bush was foolish to include Iran in his Axis of Evil speech.
Iran does not have a credible nuclear weapons programme, nor does it
present a real threat to its neighbours. "Militant Islamist" is not the
same as "supporter of terrorism". If Bush were to apologise for this,
it is not impossible that Iran could become an ally in his campaign
against Iraq.

Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11th Al Qaeda attack.
This
should not need saying, but apparently 60% of Americans believe he did,
according to a survey cited in Berlin's Tagesspiegel.

Postscript #1: The Bush tax cut

The Communitarian Network (comnet@gwu.edu) asked:

The Wall Street Journal asks about the Bush Administration's
new tax initiatives: "Is [Bush] too eager to cut taxes for the
rich? Or are his critics so eager to soak the rich that they'd
settle for a smaller economy with less for all?" (1/2/03).
Elsewhere, the issue has been framed as a choice between growth
and jobs and--class warfare. But one may argue that the most
stimulative tax break is one that mainly benefits working class
and middle class people--because these groups would spend most
if not all of the money gained through a tax cut, while the
rich would primarily increase their savings. What do you think?

William Niskanen's, chairman of CATO Insitute's, response:

96% of income taxes are paid by the top half of the income
distribution, and over a third are paid by the top 1% of the
income distribution. The left has created somewhat of a
Catch-22 in this country. The income tax structure is so
progressive that only the rich pay any significant income
taxes, and then the left opposes any income tax cuts because
they benefit only the rich; taking their argument seriously
would eliminate tax cuts as a potential policy instrument, even
if they would significantly increase economic growth.

My reaction:

Interesting claim by the CATO Institute. Is it true?

I agree with Burkart Holzner's response "The
ideologically slanted question posed by the Wall Street
Journal is an assertion, not a question at all. It
implies that the huge new tax cut is a necessity for
economic growth. This is not the case..."

Maybe the communitarian network is interesting for
advogatans, be they conservative, republican, social
democrat or other, and maybe COMNETians would find
raph's work on formal trust metrics interesting?

A certification is an assertion by an individual
that a person, or an abstract entity, possesses a named
property. This generalises the existing definition used on
Advogato;

A policy is a list of criteria that a set of
certifications may or may not satisfy. A individual's
certifications are said to be in conformance with a policy
when these criteria are satisfied.

A centre is an abstraction that consists of a list
of trusted individuals, and a policy. Centres may be used to
generate trust metrics, and a web of certifications may contain
many centres. The name centre is drawn from some of
Christopher Alexander's post-patterns writings.

Examples of centres: a centre to represent those unfairly
excluded from the main advogato centre, for whatever reason.

Useful certifications:

person' certification's
conform to policy P;

Account A1 on H1 and account A2 on H2 belong to
the same person.

I talked about Advogato's experiment with formal trust-metrics with my
wife a few days ago. She like the idea a lot, and mentioned an
interesting idea of the evolutionary biologist Robin Dunbar, who in his book
"Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language" argues that the adaptive
function of language is that it
allows people to gossip, which gives us much better ways of knowing who
in a large group is trustworthy or not; to sloganise: gossip makes
large social groups possible.

First answer, to question #3: mglazer
rated all of their diary entries at 1; incidentally he also rated the
diary entries of
ladypine,
moshez,
shlomif,
nixnut, and
ChrisMcDonough at 10. Congratulations to bgeiger who got it. I think it is reasonable
to assume that mglazer is not interested in reading any criticism of
his anti-arab hate campaign.

Dialectology
I've recently been thinking about getting languages to talk to each
other, mostly in the context of the LISP family, and have been struck
by how difficult it is to give clear, language independent, information
in a program text about what language you are writing in, and what
coding conventions you are using. I've thought of a simple device to
correct this, a "dialect" directive, that could easily be integrated
into any programming language. Here are a few examples to illustrate
what I am talking about:
For C:

I think having a reasonably coherent, cross-language, machine
readable set of conventions for indicating the dialect of a source text
is useful, particularly for allowing syntax-directed editors to
reliably determine how to format program text, and to figure what
identifiers are introduced and how they are used.

An issue is: should dialect directives extend the language? My
opinion is they should, since they could be used to influence the
semantics of the program, but they should be permitted to occur in
comments, so ensuring backwards compatibility.

I'd like to write an advogato article about this, probably in a
couple of weeks time, but I have to hammer down a few ideas first. In
the meantime I am interested in any comments or references to similar
ideas.

Postscript
Withdrew my certification of robocoder as
apprentice due to his (cynical|confused) certification of
mglazer as master.

Stressful month:
The month so far from my last diary entry has been the most stressful
month of a year with many stressful months: I feel relieved just to
have enough space and emotional energy to be typing this diary
entry. To give a taste of my month: on or around the 17th me and my
wife were challenged by four thugs on the U1 Berlin underground line,
one of who kicked me in the eye, sending me to hospital for two days.
That was the second most stressful event of this month... I'm much
better now, and am satisfied to say the police have a very good
chance of catching them: there are three eye-witnesses, and the
police (who have been great; the Berlin police have a not entirely
undeserved bad reputation in Germany) want me to come in and look at
photos.

Web based proof exchange systems:
I am still very enthusiastic about raph's work here, although I am
disappointed he has used python for the implementation. Apart from
that, I think raph's writings show excellent taste and insight. What I
think he has got right:

Metamath is probably the simplest system good enough to do the
job. I don't think Hilbert systems are the best possible systems
from a proof theoretic point of view, but the problem with the more
sophisticated frameworks is that none of them are yet ``the right
thing'';

Definitions are the hardest thing to get right in a Hilbert
system based framework, and I think here is the place where it is
easiest to criticise metamath. Raph seems to have a pretty good
grasp of the issues here, which are riddled with subtleties, and
doesn't seem bound by doing things the way the experts have always
done them, which ensures that his work will be interesting whether or
not it is successful.

There have been lots of interesting comments appearing on recentlog,
but I've not had a chance to write any responses. I'll try to do
this in the next few weeks.

lkcl:
Nice series of articles on windows and its free rivals. Just a
little point: just because POSIX specifies a file system that doesn't
support interesting permissions models doesn't mean that linux and
FreeBSD can't: both of the have VFS layers that allow them to do just
this sort of thing.